Ira Threatens To Continue Bombings

Group Vows `To Get The Message Home'

February 20, 1996|By Ray Moseley, Tribune Staff Writer.

LONDON — The Irish Republican Army, accepting responsibility for a bomb blast aboard a London bus that killed one person, threatened Monday to extend its terror campaign to other British cities to "get the message home."

As the peace process unraveled still further, fears were raised that a new wave of violence could also wash over both Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland if Protestant paramilitary groups respond to the IRA attacks with their own renewed terrorist campaign.

Police made two arrests in connection with Sunday night's bus explosion in the theater district, and placed a guard on a survivor of the bombing who was hospitalized with a fractured skull and pelvis.

The Evening Standard quoted an anti-terrorist squad officer as saying: "We are treating this man as one of the bombers." Police declined to confirm that.

The bombing left nine people injured, two seriously, and police said the man killed in the blast may have been the IRA bomb carrier.

They theorized that he used a city bus to avoid police checkpoints, and said the bomb may have gone off accidentally as he was on his way to a target, possibly the nearby London Law Courts.

"The bus was not the intended target, we believe," said police commander John Grieve, head of Scotland Yard's anti-terrorist branch.

The IRA broke its 17-month cease-fire on Feb. 9 with a truck bomb in London's Docklands financial and business center that killed two people and injured more than 100. That attack came after months of deadlock in the peace process. On Feb. 15, police defused a bomb placed in a telephone box in the theater district.

An IRA official, in a telephone call to the BBC in Belfast on Monday, said the bus bombing was the work of the IRA and he professed regret for the loss of life and injuries.

Then another IRA official told Reuters news agency: "If what is happening in London doesn't get the message home, the same signal will be sent by activity in other major British cities." He apparently referred to IRA demands that Britain lift its conditions for Sinn Fein, the IRA's political wing, to participate in all-party peace talks. IRA officials use code words to identify themselves in calls to the media.

In Belfast, Sinn Fein leader Gerry Adams told Irish Radio: "The peace process is over. What we have to do is rebuild it. It takes a lot of resilience at a personal and political level. It means all of us taking risks."

British officials said Prime Minister John Major was determined to carry on the peace process despite the latest bombing. He is scheduled to hold a summit soon with Irish Prime Minister John Bruton, but no date has been set.

"We cannot allow the terrorists to think they can rule the agenda and make the British Parliament dance to their tune," one official said.

In Washington, President Clinton denounced the IRA bombings as "cowardly acts of terrorism" and "the work of individuals determined to thwart the will of the people of Northern Ireland."

"We must not let the men of the past ruin the future of the children in Northern Ireland," he said in a statement.

British and Irish officials have suspended talks with Sinn Fein pending a resumption of the cease-fire. Some speculate that Adams is finished politically because his peace initiative has been disrupted by IRA hard-liners.

The Irish Times reported in Dublin that Irish police suspect the IRA leadership has been taken over by a man with a history of involvement in violent campaigns.

It did not name the man, but said he had been previously identified as the architect of a campaign in which booby-trapped bombs were placed in vans in the late 1980s and driven to British Army posts by civilians who were told their families would be killed otherwise.

This same IRA man, the newspaper said, directed a murder campaign aimed at destabilizing Northern Ireland before an election in the late 1980s.

The IRA may have decided to confine its current bombing campaign to the British mainland because a return to violence in Northern Ireland could undermine its support among Catholics there and could lead Protestant paramilitary groups to wage a counterterror campaign.

Protestant leaders have threatened to break their own cease-fire in response to the renewed IRA attacks.

Police reportedly discovered detonators Monday in a returned rental car at Dublin airport, about 10 miles from the capital, but there were no details immediately available.

Sunday's bomb blast caused severe disruption to a public transport system that carries 6 million people a day, aroused fresh fears among Londoners about uysing the system and threatened Britain's multibillion-dollar-a-year tourist industry.

Previous IRA bombing campaigns on the mainland have not caused serious setbacks to the tourism industry. But if tourists perceive that IRA attacks will be concentrated on the mainland and intensify, that could change.